Volume 8–4 (Low Res).pdf - U&lc

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In the first year
of her Paris experience, she started
to drawShe has not stopped drawing
since. Hallelujah! Out of this bloody
Australian Kangaroo ugly duckling
grew a beautiful swan... wrote Ed
van der Elsken, the Dutch photographer
who was her dear friend, confidant
and author of a book about
her, Love on the Left Bank. He describes
her as a "sweet, funny, crazy,
poetic weirdo:' Being young, with a
voracious appetite for life—and in
the relaxed climate of the Bohemian
society of St. Germain-des-Pres-
Vali experienced everything it had to
offer: heavy talk, heavy art, heavy
love, heavy drugs. She hit bottom in
an adventure with opium and in a
confrontation with the French authorities
who expelled her and invalidated
her passport.The white knight
who came to her rescue was Rudi
Rappold, a handsome young Austrian
architect, who helped her get
her passport and her life in order.
She gave up her Bohemian wanderings,
married him and settled down
in a small, spare cabin in an inaccessible
valley near Positano in southern
Italy. In this hideaway, she and
Rudi live, along with another young
man who wandered in one day from
out of the mountains, plus a menagerie
of goats, pigs, dogs, cats, birds,
sheep, mice. Creatures great and
small take refuge in her house and
heart. When an animal friend dies,
she may bury it temporarily, but eventually
retrieves the bones, because
she finds them beautiful and wants
her"friends"close by. She has tattooed
the names of her departed dogs
on her feet to immortalize them.There
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